Does Walking Help You Be More Creative?

Walking might help you be more creative, research suggests. By comparing the creative input of people when they are sitting compared with when they are walking, researchers found that walking increased creativity by an average of 60%. Researchers predicted that walking outdoors would help creativity significantly more than indoors, but those who walked on treadmills had about the same increase in finding creative answers for problems. It is not known how walking makes you more creative, but researchers believe that the physical act of walking somehow stimulates the part of the brain required for creativity.

More about creativity:

• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition in which people have difficulty focusing, might make people more creative because they are more likely to pay attention to details and stimuli that others might find irrelevant.


• Moderate noise levels, such as the noise in a busy coffee shop, might increase creativity because it makes the logical part of the brain process the noise, opening up the creative part of the brain for abstract processes.


• Freestyle rappers who make up rhymes on the spot have been found to be able to turn off the logical part of their brain temporarily so that the creative part can take over.